So yesterday I did some happy posting on RM, logged off and went to take a shower.

When I came back in the room, my monitor didn't have a signal anymore and I heard these non-stop clicking sounds coming from what sounds like my HD about every 3 seconds.

I held my power button down to shut it off, as I had to leave for work.

This morning, I fire it up and I hear the same clicks. In the startup BIOS it does my initial RAM check and then I get this:

Pri Master HDD Error
Run Setup
F1 to resume

After hitting F1, it progressed into some sort of network check that took a few minutes (I can post details if necessary) and then attempted to boot from floppy. I rebooted and the same process happened again.

What the hell? I've done nothing to my hardware or system at all lately. Just your average everyday use.

Help?!

(Luckily, we have 2 computers in the house so I can GET help )

hmmmm it is possible that your harddrive finally kicked the bucket

is it a newer hard drive, older, no idea?

on the other computer, maybe install the old harddrive in as a secondary drive and see if you can atleast view it through windows explorer.

btw...cd should be there either today or tomorrow

It's about 2.5 years old.
The "other computer" is a Mac, I'm not hip on sticking a HD in it and trying to figure out what to do on this weird OSX business.

Any other ideas?
What could Setup possibly do to help?

im totally guessing here (its usually easier to "see" the problem then just to have it explained) but something happened to the hard drive that the bios isnt recognizing it, could be a sector was corrupted, could be that a part in the HD went bad, maybe windows is missing a key file

:rubs chin:

Interesting.

Now what can I actually do about it?

it would depend on what the actual problem is. for instance, i have just spent the past 45 minutes trying to use the windows recovery console to try to get some documents off of a harddrive, but it wasnt working. i took the hard drive out, detached my second hard drive from my pc, and slapped that one in there, and copied the documents to my pc. ill then put them on a 256mb key ring and take them to the computer that the person is using now

Well come on over and get to work. I don't have the 2nd HD option.

Might I be able to diagnose if I can boot from floppy:?

It would probably be fruitless. In my experinace I'd say your HD is f'ed for good. It's possible that rebooting several times might be able to get the system to recognize the drive and boot into Windows. If that happens back anything up you can immediatly because it wont last much longer. You will need a new hard drive no matter what, the question is weather you will be able to ge the data off it. There are processes to extract the data. Some can be pricy....some cheap. The first one would be to follow peeps suggestion. Go get another hard drive and set it up as your primary drive/os on the system. Then set the 'bad' drive up as the secondary drive and see if you can read from it at that point. If not there is some software you can get that will attempt to extract and recover the data from the drive in another way, such as this program: http://www.r-studio.com/

FUCK.

Thanks Eli.

Maybe I can buy a new HD, install it, install the old one and try to extract data from it then? Dammit dammit dammit.

this is going to sound insane, but i swear it works

take your hard drive out and put it in the freezer. after 2 hours or so take it out and let it thaw. once its dry, put it back in the pc and boot up. extract the data you need to a cd burner or what not, then buy a new hard drive.

one time i opened the freezer at work, i found a hard drive in it and asked the other tech wtf was going on and he said he was trying to recover the data from it. i laughed and went about my buisness.

3 hours later he extracted what he needed.

just this week, my buddy had a 200 gig hard drive of his hard core porn collection, the drive went bad, and he was going to shell out $400 to a data recovery business to get it back. he did the freezer thing and he was able to recover it all back

Very interesting peeps. My guess is that it works in situations where the reading head has got slightly bumped out of position and doesnt read the zero sector, and freezing it contracts the components into a better position.

I guess it's worth a shot since the alternatives are pretty grim anyway.

As this has not been commented upon yet, I felt the need to quote it.

Jesus, dude. How much porn could one person need? Back in my single days, just a couple magazines and maybe a video was enough for me.

he has alot, i mean alot as in over 600 gig i would imagine

Generally, that click is the worst sound you ever want to hear from your computer.

Hahhahahahaha sweet

nops the worst sound is total silence! Had that last summer with my final year thesis and my notebook. My HD died in less than 3 seconds! Nothing, not even clicking from it. With a clicking noise there is a chance that it calibrates itself after some restarts, but the only way for me was the recovery company... 700$ for 7 gigs of data

Ouch.

My suggestion: